Color printers typically require use and storage of color lookup tables. This is due to the variety of rendering intents, rendering modes (e.g. halftone screens) and emulations that are available on such systems. In memory-constrained versions of these systems, the color look-up tables typically must be recomputed on the fly, quantized, or compromised (by using fewer tables) and/or may be configured to serve multiple functions—to conserve memory space. For example, U.S. Publication No. 2006/0279753, entitled “Color Printing,” naming Yao et al. as inventors and published Dec. 14, 2006, teaches the use of a single multidimensional lookup table for many modes and the implementation of a set of Tone Reproduction Curves (TRCs) to address differences between modes.
In addition, a technique for compression of look-up tables has been disclosed in Aravindh Balaji, Guarav Sharma, Mark Q. Shaw, Randall Guay, “Hierarchical Compression of Color Look Up Tables,” 15th Color Imaging Conference Final Program and Proceedings, pp. 261-266 (Nov. 5-9, 2007). This technique, however, implements a relatively complicated pre-processing method (using hierarchical differential encoding and a space filling curve) prior to compression.